Worth It?
by shadowqueen15
Summary: Jessica deals with the aftermath of season 3 (may make a series including Trish's POV depending on response).
1. Chapter 1

_Jessica stared absentmindedly at the tv while Trish bustled around in the kitchen. She could smell the bacon from where it sat sizzling in the frying pan; her stomach growled, but she paid it no mind. She twirled her hair around one finger and flicked through the tv channels with her other hand._

_"__Hey," Trish said, stepping into her field of vision. She smiled at Jess, and it wasn't that beaming, starlet, _It's Patsy! _smile but her sister's real smile, and Jess could've sworn that the sun peaked out from the clouds and shone through the blinders at that very moment. "Penny for your thoughts?"_

Jessica woke up, not with a start but slowly, because leaving that memory was like stepping into the arctic circle after a warm summer's day. Rivulets of water ran from the corners of her eyes and down her face, wetting her hair and damping the pillow. The normal dreams were the hardest, the reminders of the good times that they had shared in between Trish heaving pills up into the toilet, and Jessica panicking around cars or well-dressed men with accents. Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Jessica thought of the look on Trish's face as she was led away in chains, remembered the tightness in her own chest as her sister was loaded into the helicopter and taken away forever.

She let out a long, tired breath from where she lay on her bed and, drying the tears on her cheeks with one hand, swung her legs over the side and stood up. She swooned a little and struggled to keep last night's dinner down, placing her hand on her nightstand to ground herself. In the kitchen she found a half empty bottle of Wild Turkey, and she poured herself a healthy amount before settling down at her desk and opening her laptop.

Business was good, these days. In fact, it was better than it had ever been before. Malcom worked with her now, not as an assistant but as an equal partner, because truthfully she could've never handled so many cases on her own. She was glad to have him, but she distanced herself now even more than she had in the years prior, when she yelled at him over nothing and fired him every other morning. She knows that he wishes she would confide in him, share her pain with him, because he had cared for Trish too. He shared Trish's bed for a brief period of time, and Jessica even believed that he had been half on his way to falling in love with her, before Simpson's inhaler turned her from kind, confident, put-together Trish to unstable, obsessive, drug-addict Trish.

Her left hand began to itch, and she flexed it on instinct. There was a scar there from when Trish had stabbed her, serving as a constant reminder of Jessica's newfound hero status and the price that she had paid to achieve it. For a while, she had struggled to accept the knowledge that she still loved Trish more than she had ever loved anything in her whole life, even after everything that had happened between them. She was beyond the point of making excuses for her sister's actions; it was not Erik's fault she had turned out the way she did, nor was it Malcom's, contrary to what she had accused both of them of at some point. No, she understood now that the only person to blame was Trish herself, but that's what made her lingering attachment to her so hard to accept. She knew what Trish had become, but she loved her anyway.

No one knew what happened to inmates on the Raft. She had done a rather extensive google search to try and find information, but ultimately came up empty handed. Yet she still wondered: did Trish get to exercise there? Was she being fed enough? Did she have a cellmate, or was she on her own? Did she regret what she had done to Jessica, her best friend and her sister, the only person who had ever truly cared about _her_, and not the ditsy, smiling persona that she presented to the world? Jess thought she knew the answer to the last one at least. She had seen the disbelief in Trish's eyes when she slid the knife into Jessica's palm, intense anger giving away to pain and regret. Jess was sure that that's what she'd seen in the moments before she slammed Trish to the floor, but still she worried that her own hopes were clouding her objectivity.

The sound of the doorknob rattling snapped her out of her reverie, and she shot Malcom a tiny smile as he stepped over the threshold and into her apartment. "I got breakfast," he announced. He reached into the brown paper bag he was holding and pulled out a bagel wrapped in wax paper. "It's cream cheese and lox, just like you like it."

"Thanks," she told him. She unwrapped the bagel and took a healthy bite. God, she was fucking hungry. She always craved a bagel when she was hungover, which she supposed meant that she craved a bagel all the time.

Malcom unwrapped his own breakfast and sat down across from her. "So," he started around mouthfuls of bacon egg and cheese. "Did you remember to run by the morgue last night and check if they've had any new bodies brought in?"

"Fuck," Jess said. "Shit, I'm sorry. I went to the bar for happy hour and I completely fucking forgot." In truth, she had gone for happy hour and proceeded to get absolutely plastered. Like can barely walk, can barely see, can barely talk type plastered. Her taxi driver had been a blonde woman and she was pretty sure that she had called her Trish at least once. Or maybe she hadn't actually been a blonde woman, and Jessica was just seeing things at that point. Who knew?

Malcom sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "I'll do it today, okay?" he told her gently. "Just take the day off. Sleep, recover, or you know…whatever." He finished his breakfast and stood up, walking to the door before glancing back over his shoulder at her. They locked eyes, and he looked at her as though he had never seen anyone quite so sad. "Jess, I'm here if you need to talk. I know you don't want to, but I mean it, okay? Just…think about it."

He turned the knob and stepped out, and when the door slammed shut behind him Jessica lowered her head and rested it on the edge of the desk, her breaths coming short and quick and keeping time to the beating of her broken heart.


	2. Chapter 2

It took a few months of living with the Walkers for Jess to truly understand them.

It was easy for her to get down Dorothy's MO; she was a leech, mooching off of her daughter's talent and beauty in order to live the luxurious life that she had always dreamed of. She micromanaged Trish because she hoped that that when her daughter got older, everything she had beat into her would just take over naturally. She worried constantly that Trish would get fat, or get ugly, or get complacent, and so she kept up a steady habit of subtle verbal abuse, the kind that seemed harmless enough but could send Trish into a mental breakdown when it went on long enough.

Trish, on the other hand, was much harder to pin down. This was mostly because for all she had in life, all the looks and talent and public adoration, she was not happy. Entitled? Definitely. A little spoiled? Sure. But happy? Not by a long shot. The wide smiles that Trish wore on her television show and during photoshoots disappeared almost immediately once the cameras turned away. Her posture would loosen in a way that made it look like she was trying to curl in on herself, and she would slink off into her room and shut the door. Jessica could relate to her in that way, since she herself preferred to spend most of her time in her own room, shut off from human contact.

Jessica observed Trish with her mother, with her producers, with her friends. After a while, she thought she might be beginning to get it. Trish's mother may have been primarily responsible for her severely low self esteem, but her producers certainly didn't help. One of them even told her that maybe she should try and lose weight before the start of their next season, despite the fact that Trish weighed about one hundred pounds soaking wet. She turned to her friends for respite, and they introduced her to alcohol first, then weed, then coke, and god knows what else. Once Trish liked it as much as they did she began to pay for it and then BAM, she was a walking, talking drug dispenser for whoever was shitty enough to latch onto her.

It hit Jessica like a moving freight train one day, ramming into her when she was laying back against her bed listening to music that Dorothy hated. Trish had never been loved by anybody else in her whole life. Now, Jessica hated herself. Truly, thoroughly hated herself. The only person she hated more than herself was probably Dorothy, and she was aware of how sad that was. But she thought that maybe the fact that Trish had never been loved—not by her mother, her father, or her friends—was even sadder.

Once she made this realization, she began to like Trish infinitely more than she initially had. They really started bonding after she shoved Dorothy against the wall for trying to make Trish throw up her dinner. When Dorothy was off blowing one producer or another for a pay raise, she and Trish would bust into the liquor cabinet and get plastered. They'd order pizza and Trish would eat as many slices as she wanted, and then they'd make popcorn and throw the kernels at each other from across the couch. They watched _It's Patsy!_ reruns and laughed at how fucking bad the show really was. And then they'd fall asleep, and Jessica was always shocked at how easily sleep came when she hung out with Trish.

She began to not just tolerate Trish's presence, but actively enjoy it. This knowledge didn't come to her as a grand revelation, but snuck up on her slowly, until she woke up one day to find that when Trish was sad, she was sad. When Trish was happy, she was happy. And when Trish was hurt, so was she. Within about a year of the accident and Jessica's subsequent adoption by the Walker family, it had become her a Trish against the world. They fantasized about escaping Dorothy's clutches and getting their own place, pursuing things that they really wanted to pursue. Trish wanted to use her fame to propel herself into a field that actually made a difference in people's lives, and for Jess, hey, college didn't actually sound too bad.  
Out of the wreckage that was her life, something truly beautiful had been born. Jessica knew this to be true after the Max Tatum incident occurred and Trish stumbled home half drunk and crying, her dress straps falling down and her underwear clutched in one hand. Jessica had felt anger rise up in her then, silent and deadly, and she knew that she would do anything for Trish. When her friend collapsed onto her bed and began sobbing earnestly against her pillow, Jessica slid in next her and curled protectively around her, as if the damage hadn't been done already and she could save Trish from it. She didn't say anything, she just sat there and held her. And after a while, when the anger faded to be a dull throb that pulsed along with her beating heart, Jessica began to think that this felt a little like family.

It felt a little bit like love.


End file.
